Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  “You shouldn’t ask questions to which you might not want to know the answers,” I say.

  “I want to know,” she says.

  “I did.”

  She sighs.

  “That makes me very sad,” she says. “I really would have liked for you to still be a virgin when you got married.”

  12

  THE WALL

  ALL ALONG THE FOOT OF THE WALL, men are scattered. Some stand with the sole of their shoe pressing into the cinder block while others sit, leaning into it, the razor wire cutting into the blue sky above.

  “Here,” his buddy says, holding a joint out to him. They are sitting next to each other, knees bent, head back, taking refuge in the sliver of shade the afternoon sun is casting along the bottom edge of the wall.

  “That stuff doesn’t agree with me,” he says, waving it away, saying that it either makes him sleepy or paranoid. The last time he had smoked weed, he was still living in Chicago and had stopped by to visit some friends, a young couple that lived near the bowling alley. Even before stepping onto their porch, he could already smell the weed coming through the screen door, the couple wild with laughter inside the house. They had offered him the joint, and he had taken a few drags, and later, on his way to the bowling alley, he had felt like he was suffocating in his own body. He had turned the car around and headed home to lie down for a bit, and had ended up sleeping until the next day.

  “This is really good stuff, Jose,” his buddy says. “It will melt your cares away.”

  There wasn’t enough green on the planet to melt his cares away. When they first brought him back to Zacatecas, he had stood before a judge recounting the events of that day. Saying it had all started over a disagreement between Ricardo and Manuel, something about some horse races. He told the judge that he hadn’t meant to shoot Manuel, that he had gone to hit him with the butt of his gun and a bullet had escaped. His testimony didn’t hold up against that of the eyewitnesses, and perhaps the only part of his testimony that wasn’t fabricated was his saying that he and Manuel had never had any problems, had always gotten along, and the minute his gun had gone off, he had regretted it. But it was too late for regrets, and the judge ruled that he had acted ruthlessly, and in cold blood had taken the life of his brother-in-law.

  Almost immediately after he was sentenced, his parents put the house with the pink limestone arches up for sale.

  “I will sell everything if I have to,” his father said, after his first visit. “I don’t care if I have to sell all the livestock, La Mesa, La Peña, and the ranch even. I will sell it all, but I refuse to die and leave one of my sons behind bars,” he said, as if he had a choice in the matter. His diabetes had grown hungrier, perhaps aggravated by the stress of having a son in prison, and from behind the iron bars, Jose had watched the disease slowly consume his father—taking first his right leg and then the other—both amputated at mid-thigh.

  The last time he had seen his father, they had pushed him in on a wheelchair, a wool blanket draped over the stumps where his legs had been. He told Jose that the house had sold. The owner of the zapatería had offered 750,000 pesos, and though it was considerably below market value, they had accepted the offer, as time was running out for all of them. Jose had been in prison for five months and there was talk of his being transferred to the much larger Zacatecas federal prison in the next town over and, if that were to happen, his fate would practically be sealed. Bribing someone in the federal system would be trickier and much more expensive than dealing with the local jurisdiction.

  His parents deposited the money into an account for the attorney that was working on his case and, a month later, his father passed away. Jose had gone to speak with the comisario and asked for permission to attend his father’s funeral.

  “If we let you go, Jose, you’re not going to try anything clever, are you?” Jose had given his word, and the comisario had agreed, because in a town where land and livestock were still bought and sold on nothing but a handshake, a man’s word was only as good as the man himself.

  On the day of the funeral, when the first bell rang out, Jose was already waiting for the two guards who would accompany him to the cathedral, and by the time the second bell rang out, the guards were escorting him down the limestone steps of the prison. Inside the cathedral, the air was cooler and smelled of wax and holy water. His father’s coffin was sitting at the altar. The two guards waited at the entrance as he made his way toward the front, the rattle of his handcuffs mixed with a whisper here and a cough there as he walked by. The third bell rang out, the priest lifted his arms, and everyone rose. If he were going to try anything clever, this would’ve been when.

  He took a seat in the front pew, next to his mother and sisters. After the service, he bid his father farewell and then eight men hoisted the coffin onto their shoulders and made their way out the cathedral’s side door. He watched the procession as it headed toward the cemetery on the hill, on the outskirts of town, where his son was buried. The comisario had allowed him to cross the plaza and attend his father’s service, but to go all the way to the cemetery was out of the question—word or no word.

  A few months after his father died, they transferred him to the Zacatecas federal prison, and every day since he arrived at this place has felt like another brick in the wall. Each day solidifying against him, pushing him further from the reach of hope. He’s heard that his mother’s health has deteriorated so much that she can no longer fend for herself and is living with his youngest sister, who is selling off the livestock and land his father left behind at an alarming rate. If he ever does get out of this place, he’ll be lucky if there is a sliver of land left for him to drop dead on.

  He takes the joint, takes a long drag, though he knows no amount of weed is going to vanquish his troubles, even if Pascuala had recently sent him a letter saying that she forgave him for what he had done. That if he should ever get out of that place, she didn’t want to have any problems with him. Whether or not she had forgiven him wasn’t at the root of his turmoil because he knew he would never forgive himself. No amount of regret would ever make the past right again. Nothing would open the door that he himself had sealed shut with a single blast—his kids on one side of it and he on the other.

  It had been ten years since he had loaded up his truck with their discarded clothing, towels from the factory where his wife worked, contraband, and a few photo albums. His baby girl, La Poderosa, had been ten years old when he left. Now she was twenty, and if by chance she were to show up on the other side of the bars during visiting hours, he probably wouldn’t even recognize her. Ten years had come crashing down between them like an unstoppable avalanche. What stood between them now? Two thousand miles, these prison walls, the border itself—he would probably die inside this bedbug-infested place and never see any of his kids again.

  He takes another drag and notices how, across the courtyard, heads are turning. A hand rises to scratch the welt on a biceps, eyes squint, and he gets the feeling that all these subtleties are connected—part of some grand scheme. He hands the joint back to his buddy and pushes himself to his feet, saying he’s going to go lie down for a bit. When he reaches his cell, he stretches out on his cot and dozes, though there is no room for dreaming in a place like this—a place where nights are filled with thin sleep, sleep as translucent as rice paper.

  13

  MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS

  ONCE I’M BACK AT SCHOOL, I track down Mathew’s number and call him several times, mainly around two in the morning, after the bars have closed. He usually tells me to fuck off and hangs up, but sometimes he’ll humor me, ask how my semester is going.

  “Fine,” I say, and try to convince him to come over. “We don’t have to do anything. It would just be nice to cuddle,” I say.

  “You’re still hurting, aren’t you?” he says.

  “I already told you I was sorry,” I say. “It’s not like I slept with the guy.”

  “You’re so fucked up and
you don’t even realize it,” he says one of those nights, and hearing him say this is sort of frightening, because he knows nothing about my past—not my brother, not my uncle, nor my father—nothing. Hearing him say this makes me feel like maybe he knows something I don’t know, like maybe he can see something I’ll only notice once it’s too late.

  “Are you coming over or not?” I say, clearing my throat.

  “One day you’re going to wake up and realize how fucked up you are,” he says.

  “Fuck you,” I say, because I can practically see him lying in his bed and getting off on offending me. “I’m never calling you again.”

  “Oh, you will.”

  “Mark my words,” I say, “never again.” I slam the phone down before he has a chance to respond, and don’t ever call him. Not drunk. Not sober. Never.

  A few days after that conversation, I’m at a party. I step out onto the porch and run into a friend, who happens to be talking to Melissa.

  “Hey, Maria, you know Melissa, right?” he says. “Weren’t you guys just in Spain together?”

  “Yeah,” I say, in the calmest tone I can muster, though the very sight of her face sends the blood boiling in my veins. “How was Italy?” I ask.

  “Really nice,” she says, half-smiling.

  “So, what places did you guys end up visiting?” I ask.

  “Oh, we were in Milan for like a few days, then we spent like a week in Rome, and then went to Florence, and … um…” She presses her lips tight, too tight, and her face seems to grow grotesquely larger as she goes on and on, and soon the pores on the tip of her nose are the only thing I see, because everything else has receded, and she must feel the weight of my glare because she’s struggling to complete her sentences.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say.

  “Sure,” she says, lifting her brows.

  “Is your life so lame that in order to make it a bit more exciting, you have to go sticking your nose in other people’s business?” I ask.

  “Um, well,” she scratches her neck, “Mathew is a friend of mine, and, and you shouldn’t have cheated on him.”

  “Who the fuck are you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do?” I say, clenching my fists and taking a step toward her. She turns away and I have to contain the urge to punch her, to crack her once, hard, and drop her, but her chin is trembling so much that I sort of feel sorry for her. She seems so helpless, so pathetic, and besides, I haven’t been in a fistfight since I was in sixth grade. I may not even have it in me anymore.

  I push past her, go back inside, and find my friends, and by the time we leave the party, she’s long gone. But after that day, whenever I happen to cross paths with her, she clears out of my way. If we are both walking down the sidewalk toward each other, the minute she sees me, she crosses the street and walks on the other side. If we’re walking toward the same building in the quad, she’ll go around the building and in through a different door.

  The semester is well under way and I’m sitting on my bed, books and papers sprawled everywhere, when there is a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” I say, and Tracey, one of my thirteen roommates, pops her head in. I’m living in a four-story, fourteen-bedroom house with a full basement, ten parking spaces, and a large front deck with twelve other girls and Pablo, a foreign exchange student from Ecuador.

  “Hey,” she says, “I just ran into Martin McCarthy on the quad and he asked me to give you a message.”

  “Martin McCarthy?” I say. “Really?” Martin McCarthy had lived in the apartment below ours the year before, and though I had met him once or twice and would often run into him, we had never said much to each other beyond the initial hello. But there was something intriguing about him. He was tall, about six foot two, and even though his roommates were the T-shirt-and-baseball-cap-wearing types, he had shoulder-length blond hair that looked like he had chopped it himself. He wore vintage trousers, printed button-down shirts, black leather combat boots, and he was the lead singer of a band that was based out of Chicago. “What did he say?”

  “He was all like, ‘You’re living with Maria, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And he was like, ‘Will you give her a message for me?’ and I was like, ‘Sure.’ And he was like, ‘Will you tell her that I want to have her baby.’”

  “He said that?” I say, a grin spreading across my face. “That he wants to have my baby?”

  “Yup,” she says, “those were his words.”

  A few days later, I have an extra ticket to see a band that’s playing at a local venue. I get Martin’s number from my roommate and give him a call.

  “Hey,” I say when he answers. “I know you’re into music and I have this extra ticket for a show, and I thought you might want to join me, but if you can’t, it’s no big deal, really.”

  He says he’d love to join me, and later that night, while sharing a pitcher of beer, he tells me he was brought up Irish Catholic and is the youngest of six, four boys and two girls. Both his maternal and paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, and though his father was born and raised in the United States, he worked blue-collar jobs his whole life, and put all of them through college.

  “We knew we had to be home and sitting at the dinner table at five p.m. sharp, every day,” he says. “My job was to set out the chilled glasses of milk for everyone.”

  “That’s so sweet,” I say. Sitting down for dinner as a family was something I had always fantasized about when I was a kid. Eating dinner in our house had always been a free-for-all. Either one of my older sisters or I made dinner when we got home from school, and everyone ate as they came home from school or work, and if someone didn’t like what was for dinner, they helped themselves to a bowl of cereal or a tall glass of milk and a stack of cookies. Once I had gone out of my way and had taken my mother’s china from the cabinet and set the table, complete with silverware and napkins. I had made everyone wait until we could all sit down and eat together. Though they seemed confused, thrown off by the order of it all, they had waited, and when we were all sitting around the table, passing around the salad, mashed potatoes, and fried chicken, my siblings had started cracking jokes about how elegant it all was, and asked could someone please pass the butter, and why were we eating bread instead of tortillas, and why was there no salsa on the table, and why we were eating such a gringo dinner, and soon they were all roaring with laughter. Before I could finish my meal I had burst into tears, run into my bedroom, and shoved my head under my pillow.

  “What about you?” he asks, pouring me another beer. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

  “Six,” I say, instantly feeling like a liar. But it’s easier than saying I had seven, but now I only have six. “I have four sisters and two brothers.”

  “Big family.” He fills his glass and holds it up. “To big families,” he says. We toast, we drink. “So, do your folks still live in Somerset?” he asks.

  “They’re separated,” I say. “My mother is still there, but my father is in Mexico.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say, because I’m not about to tell him that my father is in prison. Though I had heard that his parents had sold a house they owned in order to try and bail him out. My godfather, the owner of the zapatería, had bought the house and demolished it almost immediately. Rumor had it that he had found several clay jugs filled with gold coins hidden within its thick adobe walls. There was so much money, in fact, that if he never wished to work another day in his life, he didn’t have to. “We don’t really keep in touch,” I say.

  Martin walks me home that night, kisses me goodnight on my front porch, and leaves. A few days later we go out again, and he walks me home and stays. In the morning, he asks me about the Glastonbury poster on my closet door, and I tell him about Abigail and the three guys from Chico. How we had met while living in Granada, where Abigail was staying in a cave on the other side of the Moorish wall. On Fridays after class, I’d hike up to her cave a
long the dirt trails behind the wall and we would all camp out for the weekend. Then, on Monday morning, I’d hike back down, just in time to make my 9:00 a.m. economics class, the scent from the campfire and a few grass blades still lingering in my hair.

  The next time Martin comes over, he brings his music collection, and soon we are spending countless hours locked in my bedroom, burning through candles and listening to music. We set my five-disk changer on shuffle and one minute we’re doing the tango to “Paint It Black” by the Stones, and the next minute we’re improvising a dance routine to “7” by Prince. When I’m in my room, I like to pretend I’m in a New York City flat. Though I’ve never been to New York, my room is what I imagine a studio in New York looks like: bed in one corner, couch in the other, next to the radiator, fire escape outside the window, and the bathroom across the hall. I tell Martin that someday I want to live in New York. Since he’s a musician, he thinks he might want to live in New York as well.

  Halloween rolls around and before heading out for the evening, he comes over to pick me up.

  “What are you supposed to be?” he asks when I come down the wide wooden staircase in a white vintage wedding dress that fits as though it were custom made for my frame.

  “The bride of Frankenstein,” I say. Earlier, after zipping up the dress, I had dabbed white powder on my face, frizzed my hair out, and painted a black lightning bolt from my hairline down and across my forehead with my eyeliner. I had then squirted fake blood on the side of my mouth, so that it ran over my chin and down my neck before disappearing into the low V-cut neckline of the dress.

  “Doesn’t she wear a black dress?” he says.

  “Does she?” I say. “All right, then. I’m a bride. A dead bride. See?” I point at my forehead. “I was struck dead by lightning on my wedding day.”

  “There you go, that works.” He offers me his arm and we head out. He’s wearing a purple polyester tuxedo, a white shirt with green ruffles on the front, and a black top hat. Walking down the street, arm in arm, we must look like a bride and groom that crawled out of an abandoned trunk in a Salvation Army basement.